Are Your Children Faced with School Anxiety?

Anger is an all-consuming emotion at times, even more so now as we deal with new situations. If you don’t get a grip on it, it can affect your quality of life. Anger will damage your relationships and raise your stress levels. If anger is beginning to impact your life, start taking steps to control your emotional state.

At Pathways Counseling, we assist many children who face school anxiety daily. This is not a new issue, but our society has become more aware of it. Social media does play an instrumental role as well. With social media, children cannot escape their daily events. Regardless, we are here to help your children learn coping mechanisms to deal with it. The following provides more clarification for why anxiety occurs.

Causes Of Anxiety

Anxiety is a response people have when confronted with an uncomfortable situation. So many situations occur in a child’s daily school life. Some examples your child might face are:

• Being bullied
• Feeling overly angry
• Test Anxiety
• Not feeling prepared for the next day
• Feeling not worthy
• Not having friends
• Feeling disliked by teachers
• Being afraid to speak aloud in class
• Not chosen for a team sport

Symptoms of Anxiety

Our brains process in a way that our amygdala reacts to our emotions. When feeling oncoming danger, our emotions will heighten. This causes rapid blood flow, energy to skyrocket, and heavy breathing to occur. In essence, it creates a flight or flee reaction. The prefrontal cortex loses control not allowing one to be logical. It is difficult in these moments to be rational and maintain control and calmness.

Resources: Coping Mechanisms

Pathways Counseling encourages parents to spend time with their children. Spending time should occur when all members are calm. It is important to ensure their children feel loved and safe. Listen to what their concerns are about school. Tackle each concern with empathy and support by providing ideas to help them. Hugging and showing compassion go a long way to helping your children feel loved.

Teaching your children breathing exercises to do during these moments is beneficial. In fact, practicing them often throughout the day is critical. This will help your children refer to them when necessary, as it forms a habit. Sometimes tricks to do so might help.

An example includes taking a deep breath in before blowing out a birthday candle. Ideas like this help slow down the breathing process. In fact, children tend to place a picture of a candle on their desks as a reminder to breathe.

These strategies help students remain calmer. Then, they are able to be logical and rational. This will enable them to handle the current situation without having a panic attack.

Another strategy is teaching your child to visualize something calm. Examples include the ocean waves, or the breeze felt at a mountain lake. A bike ride in a park or feeding the ducks will also help.

Any happy memory will assist your child to relax and regulate his/her breathing.

Exercise to Relieve Anxiety

Finally, it is important that your children exercise. Exercise can be running around a playground, playing a sport, playing tag. Being outside in the sun and walking around can do wonders for a person’s mental state. According to research, being outside provides at least five positive benefits:

• Lowers blood pressure and reduces stress
• Improves your mood
• Improves your ability to focus
• Helps heal us from any injuries
• Allows us to grow and be strong

Contact Us

Pathways Counseling Services will provide you and your family the ability to reduce anxiety. Anxiety is real and we all endure it. It is not all bad. In fact it can help us persevere, but we need the skills to help us do so. Our qualified staff can assist you and your family during life’s challenges. We encourage you to schedule an appointment online, contact us or call our office at 480-235-1682. Let us help your child and family to deal and feel strong. You are not alone helping your child.

Give us a call or schedule online. It’s fast, easy and secure.